


My Kingdom For A Kiss

by Wishopenastar



Category: Yuri!!! on Ice (Anime)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fantasy, Alternate Universe - Royalty, Alternate Universe - Witchcraft, Angst with a Happy Ending, Break Up, Getting Back Together, Hurt/Comfort, King Victor Nikiforov, M/M, Post-Break Up, Raven Vicchan, Vicchan Lives, Victor's mothers are dead so warning for that, Witch Katsuki Yuuri
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-05-27
Updated: 2020-06-03
Packaged: 2021-03-03 04:48:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,251
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24409081
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Wishopenastar/pseuds/Wishopenastar
Summary: A story of a too heavy crown and broken relationships which mend.Featuring— A king who fell in love and stayed so and a witch who never wanted to become queenGuest Starring—  A namesake Raven who will shit at any person who dares break Katsuki Yuuri's heart.
Relationships: Katsuki Yuuri/Victor Nikiforov
Comments: 10
Kudos: 40





	1. Where did you go?

**Author's Note:**

  * For [katheneverwrites (mandolinearts)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/mandolinearts/gifts).



> This was such a joy to write even among so much stress.  
> The main plot is @mandolinearts' idea. I just added in words and emotion stuff.  
> Thank you Kathe for letting me write this. It has been an absolute pleasure.  
> It's a gift to Kathe because I don't have words for how I value our (relatively new) friendship.

There was only one herb Yuuri flinched on adding to the potion. It wasn't because it made the cauldron bubble up almost viciously for an hour before it settled, Yuuri flinched because of the smell which came from the cauldron resembling a person's hair too much.

Vicchan would ruffle his feathers with indignant caws at the smell.

At one time it had been a joke between them, Yuuri would make the sleeping draught as Victor sat in his safe corner of the cottage with some document or the other and whenever the smell emanated Yuuri would walk over to Victor and kiss his hair. Now it had become a source of a memory he did his best to avoid.

Yuuri was an expert in avoiding issues after all.

Avoiding people was a bit harder but he managed.

Avoiding the nobility was very hard since they made so much of his paying customer base, but Yuuri did his best.

Avoiding love— it was like Atlas's sky, a weight so big on his shoulders that at first, he felt like he would fall down every moment and then after getting used to it he still felt like falling as soon as he became conscious of the weight.

But Yuuri swore in his letters to Phichit that he was honestly better.

It was moments like these when he brewed a potion he had brewed almost every day for his King to help him sleep, before they shared a bed and he could do so by his presence. Pouring his comfort in shoulder kisses and embraces rather than a potion that Victor probably didn't even know was still sourced from his ex lover.

Well, Yuuri  _ had  _ asked Victor to maintain a distance once and Victor did that. Not even a single letter had passed between the witch and his king in the past four years.

Yuuri started stirring when the bubbling had settled down, the smell thankfully diffusing into the open air.

——

  
  


Victor laughed as he played with the glass in his hand. Yura was sitting across him working diligently as he simultaneously uttered profanities at Victor's sorting system.

"This is not even a system. How the absolute fuck do you manage to find anything."

"Well, I've tried teaching you seven times already. It's not my fault if you're mediocre at sorting cases the real way."

Victor watched Yuri's hand twitch around his pen. Yuri used to love using feather quills in the early days of his lessons with Victor but they had both learned that the quills were very easy to snap in bouts of teasing induced anger.

"Your  _ system _ includes headings like  _ 'not too important in my opinion but very important actually'.  _ There's no way someone can match with your opinions on this." Yuri's voice was getting steadily louder with each word. He looked beside Victor where his Chief Advisor Otabek sat to support whosoever of them that needed it at the moment. 

Victor noticed Otabek's slight nod of assent to Yuri's point which Yuri must have taken to be the ultimate proof of his point because he let out a triumphant noise.

Victor laughed again as he said, "I never said we need to place the same things in the system. This is just for convenience, you've already seen the standard council-wise classification of issues we went over." The laugh might have slipped off his face three years ago when he thought of the person who had come up with almost all of the titles in Victor's personal classification system. But Victor had learned to cohabitate with everything that had come of the relationship popping out in each corner he turned.

Yuuri's classification, Yuuri's still delivered sleep potions, Yuuri's raven shitting on his window when he thought Victor wasn't looking. 

Victor saw his love everywhere and that was  _ okay  _ with him _. _ Because if he fought it he might again drop into the pit of loneliness and aching want it had once pulled him out of.

——

  
  


Yuuri was one of the people who replayed their past in a loop till they found one precise moment where it all went wrong—except more often than not such a moment didn't exist. And so he was stuck constantly looking at small moments where he went wrong.

If someone had told him this wasn't what he would do when his relationship with Vitya inevitably fell apart, Yuuri would have laughed at their face. Yet this wasn't what he did. 

He replayed the memories sure, but it wasn't to look for a fault line, the fault line was a chasm that they had been crossing every day to be with the other. He replayed the memories to smile at them, to think of a better time, to bring back the Yuuri who had given so much to a broken man until one day he was asked to promise his all in marriage to the man and he couldn't find it in himself to cross the chasm again and settle his life on the other side.

Marriage to the King when you had no nobility in your blood was a big thing after all.

Marriage was a big thing after all.

Victor was a big thing.

But he relied on Yuuri too much.

Yuuri wasn't big enough for both of them.

It was hard enough accommodating himself.

Yuuri had refused that day. 

——

_ It was a perfect summer day Yuuri had last seen Victor, Yuuri could picture the scene down to the exact details—Victor’s crown glinted in the dirt where he placed it as he laid on Yuuri's thighs, his lips had been chapped when Yuuri had kissed him, his eyes were full trepidation and contrasting joy. Victor had suddenly stood and kneeled in front of Yuuri bringing out the ring that generations of children had heard of in tales of handsome royalty marrying their one true love.  _

_ The crushing pressure on his throat only increased with Victor’s  _ 'I love you. I want to spend forever with you. Marry me.' 

_ He should have seen it coming, he was in love with an idea and he should have known it would come crashing down soon.  _

_ The no that came out of his mouth was a garbled mess, like it could not decide whether to be a no that was right or the yes Yuuri and Victor so desperately wanted it to be.  _

_ He couldn't be the support Victor needed and deserved when he himself was just stumbling through the motions, he could not leave the forest and the life he had and become the queen. _

_ In the end the thought of failing Victor was what did it for him.  _

_ The previously illegible no came out clearer. _

_ —— _

Yuuri had refused and he never regretted a second of the refusal, he regretted missing the days and nights he spent with someone whom he elevated to a pedestal that was so sure to topple. Someone whom he believed to be his soulmate.

But there was nothing to be done. Victor was still the King, Yuuri was still the witch who brewed Victor's steadily decreasing demand of sleep-potions and they had parted with Yuuri telling him that he couldn't be his forever, couldn't be the person Victor needed and he wouldn't promise a lie.

They had parted. Yuuri still practiced his witchcraft, steadily rising among the closed ranks of potioneers and Victor still ruled, the throne slowly but surely stabilized.

  
  
  
  



	2. Let the castle walls come down

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> To anyone who got a notification for this chapter earlier, I'm sorry! I put out the wrong version and a lot of my notes were in it so it had to come down.  
> Be patient with me, my brain is a traitor. 
> 
> Anyways here's chapter 2, set entirely in the past in case that isn't clear. Title from My Kingdom by Alan Doyle.  
> Have some fluff and angst. (´-﹏-`；)＼(ﾟｰﾟ＼)

Victor sighed as he took in the gardens. They had been his Mama's place of escape once, when she had been alive and now they were his. 

Except escaping was all that he seemed to do these days. 

The funerals for his mother's had passed a year ago and yet he'd turn a castle corridor and imagine his Ma there, talking to some council person or the other, or he'd walk into his Mama's library hoping to run a matter with her and be yet again faced with the crushing sense of loss that had first enveloped him when his mother's had sunk into the sea.

Victor had shared a lot of himself with them and now without them he withdrew into himself. 

Victor couldn't sleep through nights without waking up in cold sweat. He was plagued by ships sinking in storms and his mothers walking away and forever away. Away until the only thing he could see of them was the glint of the crown his Ma wore and which had passed onto him.

Victor was lonely, he ached with missing.

He knew that. 

Victor was the king of a land reeling after the loss of its rulers. He was the one supposed to be the stability the people needed. 

He tried his best.

He tried in the assemblies he held every other day to address his subjects' grievances, in the nights he spent racking through books on policy and economics to develop better plans and he tried in the hours he spent learning of agriculture.

But even with all that, something essential was missing. 

Victor didn't know then what it was but with hindsight he could say that it was that he was being selfless to the right causes the wrong way, to the point of burning out. There was only one thing bound to happen and it was a crashing fall into water. 

—

Victor didn't fall. The strain on his shoulders almost reached a breaking point before the castle physician, Yakov, took him in hand and made him drink a potent sleeping drought. 

Under it Victor slept for two days. Two days of blissful nothing. The potion itself had been gulped by him in a single drink and it had burned going down and yet stuck to his throat like honey. 

Victor became a regular user of the drought. A diluted version of it was a constant presence in his bedside. It wasn't anything like the other sleeping droughts Victor had taken, it smelled faintly of his Mama's hair oil which Victor had started using as a joke with her and continued as a way of keeping her alive in his every day. Sleeping under its effects felt like the comfort Victor had missed for so long.

He finally thought to ask, "Yakov, where do you source your sleep droughts from?" 

"The one you're using?"

"Yeah."

"From an old friend of mine—Celestino. Why do you ask?" Yakov was a brusque person generally, but he had been treating Victor with much more softness these days. As much as it felt like being mollycoddled, Victor liked it.

"I wanted to thank them, they're really... helpful."

Yakov's eyes were sharp enough to catch the cloud that came over Victor's eyes when he thought of the days when he woke up each night. 

"I'll pass along your message."

"Please do."

Victor bowed and left the physicians chambers.

—

Victor had been out hunting for hours when he came across the cottage. He hadn't been in that part of the forest since many years ago when the chasing of game had been forbidden for conservation purposes and for the medics who relied on parts of that ecosystem for essential herbs and animal parts. But the deer he had spotted had led him to the area. The trees there had been marked with clear crosses to indicate they couldn't be cut down.

Victor would have been amused at its cleverness if he hadn't been so tired out. 

He had unnotched the bow as soon as he became aware of his surroundings. But he didn't do it quickly enough apparently. He felt something fall on his bow first and then on his head he peered and found it was bird poo, his bow froze midway down. 

He looked up to find a crowing raven circling him.

"HEY! PUT THE ARROW DOWN. THE ANIMALS ARE PROTECTED HERE." 

There was someone yelling at him. Victor looked to find probably the most beautiful person he had ever seen standing fifteen paces from him. The devil raven flew to his shoulders and settled with a smug satisfaction that should have been impossible to convey through a beak. 

Victor could only stare at the approaching person. 

"I'm sorry! I only told him to caw at you. He hasn't been trained to not shit on people yet."

"You..told him to caw at me?" Victor said as he got down from his horse.

"Yeah to make you put the arrow down. I honestly didn't even tell him to go so close to you. He's just a bit stubbornly the S-T-U-P-I-D word, if you get what I mean." The person looked at the bird perched on his shoulder a bit ruefully.

"You talk to birds."

"Talk is uh, an exaggeration. I can only communicate with the Corvidae family and even then I can only understand their intentions not their words. It's really nothing special."

"..."

"Oh! Here."

Victor felt like he could swoon as the person in front of him took out a handkerchief and reached up to wipe at Victor's head.

"I'm Yuuri. Katsuki Yuuri." He said as he took Victor's bow from his hands to wipe at it next. Victor bowed in gratitude.

"I'm Victor. Victor Nikiforov."

Yuuri smiled at him then. And Victor felt himself weaken. "I know who you are, Your Majesty."

—

Victor was the kind of person who could completely immerse himself in anything he wanted. And did he want Yuuri. 

He  _ courted _ Yuuri. He brought gifts and he brought chocolate to Yuuri. 

One time—

"So this is a bird feeder?" Yuuri looked at the object in his hands with wonder.

"Yes, For your—" It would be bad form to make a face about a pet while courting its owner, "—Raven." 

"You brought a gift for Vicchan." Yuuri's face had lit up. But his words simultaneously made a fierce joy and dread course through him.

"Yuuuuri, you named the devil bird after me!?" 

Yuuri blushed. 

Victor fell a bit deeper into the hole he was in. 

"His name is technically Minami. Except...when I call him Vicchan he becomes more docile? I feel like he's competing with you."

Victor huffed and turned away. Yuuri acknowledging that there was something to compete about was further than he had gotten in weeks. He'd take it.

Yuuri was less conscious of gifts Victor brought for  _ him  _ though. He'd offered to pay back for the dragonhide gloves Victor got him, which had led to an embarrassing exchange about money boundaries and how Victor bought things because he wanted Yuuri to have them. 

He might as well have declared his intentions then and there. Except Yuuri...for all his brilliance with potions, never noticed. 

—

Yuuri was brewing a surface wound healing tonic while Victor sat near him, Victor was immersed in what he was writing and Yuuri sneaked looks at him as he stirred.

Victor was a truly gorgeous man, the realisation came to him a lot of times in quiet moments like then and Yuuri felt heat crawling up his face each time. 

There was something between them. Trepidation covered it, and Yuuri was afraid of naming it for fear of it becoming too real, but there was something between them.  _ Why else would the King come to see me in a cottage so deep inside the forest?  _

Yuuri finished stirring and moved to the cupboards to get thyme. He was immersed in thoughts, deep enough that he didn't quite notice he had stumbled until his heart was racing as Victor caught him. 

"Are you alright, darling?"

"I—I am okay. Thank you for catching me."

"Always, my Yuuri."

There was something between them and Yuuri didn't want to put a name to it, except Victor had christened it already.

—

Rainy days were Victor's least favorite, but Yuuri revelled in them. 

It was the third time he was visiting the castle rather than waiting for Victor to come see him and the unexpected rain meant that court let off early. 

Yuuri was sitting on a rug, leaning against Victor's chair as he researched to develop his scent enhancing powder. There were no results so far and he was getting increasingly frustrated. If not for Victor's hands carding through his hair, he might already have given up and screamed. 

Victor was on the chair, a book in his hands as he worked on the notes he took regarding taxes in the meeting. 

Yuuri gave up on his notes and flipped the notebook to it's past pages, where he had been working on something else entirely. He slipped the notebook into Victor's lap.

"Yuuri, what's this?"

"It's a system. You've mentioned being unable to prioritize and I thought it was because your ma's system didn't really fit you. So I made one for you." 

It was deceptively simple, classifying jobs on the basis of the amount of worrying Victor did about them to Yuuri, but it had taken him days to set parameters. 

"It's rough! You don't need to use it, I just wanted to try my hand." 

Victor looked down at Yuuri's work and tilted his chin. 

"It's good."

—

The days were getting better. Victor felt the awful longing less and less as he spent time with Yuuri. It was like he was finally learning to lean on someone who would crumble under the weight.

It felt good 

Yuuri was good.

The crown on his head was of gold, it gleamed in light but it was heavy and Victor's head dropped under it. But Yuuri would stand on his tiptoes and bring his chin up, Victor was in love. 

Victor had always wanted what his mothers had. A relationship built on such a good foundation that it could hold anything in it, it could ride them through anything. His Ma had even the crown when his mother, the crown princess, had given it up. Their love had surrounded him growing up and it felt like coming home. 

When he was with Yuuri, Victor believed Yuuri  _ was  _ his home.

—

They didn't talk about what they were for each other. Not really. 

Yuuri believed he'd do anything to keep Vicor happy and in his life the way he was. 

Victor knew he wanted to keep Yuuri by his side and never let go.

They didn't talk about the crown Victor placed on a cushion on Yuuri's mantle whenever he came over. The crown which left curves in his hair due to its weight, was abandoned in the hours of the cottage. 

But life didn't work like that. 

Victor couldn't just remove the crown like it was the switch to stopping his worries and Yuuri couldn't just think of the crown as a pretty accessory on his mantle which gleamed in the firelight. 

It was all too real.

Falling in love with Victor hadn't come as a realisation to Yuuri. It had been inevitable. But what came as a realisation was the fact that he had been pretending something would come off it. That the fact that Victor was his King didn't matter, except it was the one thing which mattered. 

Yuuri had been called selfish before, but he wasn't when he was aware. And he became too painfully aware of the fact that Victor was never going to leave the throne, his crown for the sake of a love that had come too suddenly.

They didn't talk.

But Yuuri understood where the other stood. On a pedestal he'd have to abandon to keep a love which gave to him reassurance, confidence, that he should have had already.

  
  
  


**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading!   
> YouTuber voice-  
> Please like, comment and subscribe for more content (Jk) It'll have five chapters and will update weekly.  
> Title is from the Jeff Buckley song, 'Lover, You Should Have Come Over'  
> Chapter titles are from 'My Kingdom' by Alan Doyle—the song which inspired this fic.


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